Citrix Hypervisor feature matrix

Please refer to the sections below detailing Citrix Hypervisor features by product edition and release type.

Comprehensive application and desktop hypervisor management platform

Citrix Hypervisor is the most highly optimized hypervisor platform for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops workloads. With tight feature integration throughout the stack, Citrix Hypervisor exposes hardware-level features for a high definition user experience, greater security and simplified operational management. Containing comprehensive, enterprise-class features and performance, Citrix Hypervisor can handle different workload types, mixed operating systems and complex storage or networking requirements with ease, and for the most demanding business use cases.

The 64-bit control domain manages the pooling of resources and workloads running on the host.

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Hardware Compatibility
List (HCL) Support

Citrix actively works with hardware OEMs to ensure all commonly used hardware types are tested and supported with Citrix Hypervisor. The HCL of supported hardware can be found at: http://www.citrix.com/Citrix Hypervisor/hcl.

The XenCenter GUI is a Windows based interface that allows for the management of hosts and resource pools (collections of hosts) in a simple to use scalable manner.

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Active Directory Integration

For support of multiple user accounts on a server or pool, utilize Microsoft Active Directory services to authentication. This lets Citrix Hypervisor users log into a pool of Citrix Hypervisor hosts using their Windows domain credentials.

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Role-Based Administration and Control (RBAC)

RBAC allows you to assign users, roles and permissions to control who has access to Citrix Hypervisor hosts. Citrix Hypervisor RBAC maps individual or groups of users to defined, which in turn have associated Citrix Hypervisor permissions.

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Citrix Hypervisor vApps

vApps provide the ability to group multiple VMs together, to startup, shut down, set HA and recovery order policies, all at the vApp level.

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Dynamic Memory Control (DMC)

DMC automatically adjusts the amount of memory available for use by a guest VM’s operating system. By specifying minimum and maximum memory values, a greater density of VMs per host server is permitted.

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Performance Reporting and Alerting

XenCenter provides the ability to monitor VM workload and host infrastructure performance, for compute, memory, network and disk metrics. Administrative alerts can also be defined.

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Live Memory VM
Snapshot and Revert

Citrix Hypervisor provides a mechanism that can take a snapshot of a VM storage, memory and metadata at a given time, leveraging Microsoft Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to generate application consistent (quiesced) point-in-time snapshots.

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Live VM Migration

The live migration of VM compute workloads between two different hosts within a resource pool, allows administrators to manually manage the spread of load across their infrastructure and eliminate any outages from planned infrastructure downtime.

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Heterogeneous Resource Pools

When expanding existing resource pools, it is not always possible to obtain exactly the same hardware or CPUs. This feature enables new hosts and CPU versions to be added to existing pools, with support for all the VM-level features such as live migration you expect.

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Live-Patching

Live patching enables infrastructure admins to patch the Citrix Hypervisor hypervisor without needing to migrate VMs from the host, shut down or suspend VMs.

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Automated Updates via XenCenter

Citrix Hypervisor infrastructure hotfixes are able to be deployed from either the command line or XenCenter, and in batches, automatically downloading the required hotfixes to further simplify management of the hypervisor platform.

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Scheduled Snapshots

Scheduled snapshots enables admins to schedule hourly, daily, or weekly snapshots on a VM or group of VMs. It also includes the ability to configure the maximum number of scheduled snapshots, in which the oldest snapshot will be deleted in a rolling fashion, to aid in the lifecycle of snapshot management.

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Health Check

Automated infrastructure status uploads to Citrix, enabling IT admins to run reports to determine infrastructure health, and whether it requires updates or is misconfigured.

As a separately downloadable supplemental pack, IT admins are able to batch migrate VMs from VMware vSphere infrastructures to Citrix Hypervisor. Windows and Linux operating systems can be migrated with minimal steps and effort.

This allows for the export to a spreadsheet, of all objects within the infrastructure view of XenCenter.

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Docker Container Management

This feature enables infrastructure admins to monitor and manage environments leveraging either Linux or Windows based Docker implementations.

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Rolling Pool Upgrade (RPU)

A XenCenter feature that eliminates downtime when upgrading Citrix Hypervisor hosts. RPU autonomously patches all hosts within a pool, evacuating and repatriating VMs with Live Migration as needed.

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Maximum Pool Size

Citrix Hypervisor supports a maximum pool size of 64 hosts. An unlicensed copy of Citrix Hypervisor is limited to 3 hosts per pool.

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Microsoft Windows Server 2019 guest support*

Support for running VMs with Microsoft’s newest server operating system.

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UEFI boot for Windows VMs*†

Support for UEFI boot on newly created 64-bit Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and 2019 VMs. UEFI boot provides a richer interface for the guest operating systems to interact with the hardware, which can significantly reduce Windows VM boot times.

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* New or updated feature within the latest release
† Available as Tech Preview

Available with an OVS network, security groups is a method of tenant isolation typically used by cloud management products, such as Accelerite CloudPlatform.

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Open Virtual Switch (OVS)

When used with a controller appliance, OVS networks are a programmable networking standard based on OpenFlow and sFlow for the collection of statistics.

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Distributed Virtual Switch Controller (DVSC)

This is a GUI used for the configuration and management of OVS based infrastructures. OVS support includes fine grained security policies, access control lists (ACLs), traffic behavior and performance visibility.

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Cross-Host Private Networks

This allows IT admins to create or tear down, L2 tunnel networks between hosts, on demand, and without the need to create VLANs on the core networking infrastructure.

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SR-IOV capable network cards

Support for SR-IOV-capable networks cards delivers high performance networking for virtual machines. Citrix Hypervisor enables the use of Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) to allow a single PCI device to appear as multiple PCI devices on the physical system.

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Efficient Multicast Support

The use of IGMP snooping to direct IPv4 multicast traffic only to those VMs that have registered to listen to that specific multicast.

HA allows for the localized recovery of VMs and/or vApps due to infrastructure hardware failure. HA also ensures that a host re-election takes place, should a pool master fail.

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Site Recovery Manager

Designed to enable customers to recover VMs and/or vApps from catastrophic hardware failure of the compute, storage and/or network layers. This is typically the loss of significant portions, if not all, of the infrastructure at a given location.

Live migration of both a VM’s compute and storage, between different hosts and storage types. This can be within or across different resource pools and allows administrators complete flexibility to manually re-tier storage and eliminate planned infrastructure outages.

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Storage Live Migration

The live migration of a VM’s storage, enabling administrators to select a new target SR for each of VM’s VDIs and moving these live without downtime and without moving the compute aspect of the VM.

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Intellicache

Leveraging local host storage, Citrix Hypervisor caches reads and non-persistent writes when using a shared desktop image. This mitigates many of the off-host IOPS reducing the need for high-end arrays to support large scale infrastructures.

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MCS Read Cache

When using Machine Creation Services (MCS) images for virtualized desktop and application workloads, the reads can be cached in host RAM, providing fast, scalable access and dramatically reducing off-host IOPS, thereby reducing the need for high-end arrays to support large scale infrastructures.

GFS2 is a Linux-based shared disk file system for block storage. Enabling the option for GFS2 as a Storage Repository delivers reduced storage costs with thin provisioning for block storage capabilities.

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Changed Block Tracking

Changed Block Tracking API's for Citrix Hypervisor enables backup vendors to develop more efficient backup solutions, so that only changed blocks are backed up after the initial VM backup.

Enables high-end 3D graphics within VMs and VDI deployments for variety of use cases, including CAD/CAM, HPC and Citrix Virtual Apps published applications. Hardware GPU providers include Intel, AMD & NVIDIA, with each GPU having a one-to-one relationship with a particular VM.

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GPU Virtualization

Enables virtualized 3D GPU support for multiple VMs per host GPU, with the most comprehensive GPU vendor support. Offering superior performance when compared to software emulation, many users can leverage enhanced graphics for all supporting applications types.

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vGPU Live Migration

Enables live migration of GPU-enabled running VMs. vGPU Live Migration improves user experience by enabling administrators to rebalance GPU-enabled VMs across pool hosts to improve VM performance. vGPU Live Migration also enhances user productivity, enabling users to remain productive during unexpected maintenance. vGPU Live Migration is available upon release of supported software and graphics cards from GPU vendors.

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Disk and memory snapshots for vGPU enabled VMs*

When a disk and memory snapshot of a vGPU-enabled VM is taken the state of the VM includes the vGPU state.

Protect against hypervisor-level attacks with measured boot of the hypervisor. Integration with Intel TXT leverages hardware microprocessors to provide assurance the hypervisor has not been tampered.

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Secure Tags

Leveraging Measured Boot enables securely protected workloads and hosting infrastructure tags to be used for business compliance, ensuring protected VMs are only ever run on the appropriate infrastructure hardware.